A letter from House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) demands an explanation from the Treasury Department on why it allowed $3 billion in payments to ObamaCare insurance companies that Congress never approved.

In a well-documented piece, Philip Klein gives a disturbing summary of the Obama administration deliberately refusing to follow the law.

“At issue are payments to insurers known as cost-sharing subsidies,” writes Klein. “These payments come about because President Obama’s healthcare law forces insurers to limit out-of-pocket costs for certain low income individuals by capping consumer expenses, such as deductibles and co-payments, in insurance plans. In exchange for capping these charges, insurers are supposed to receive compensation.”

Whereas Senate Democrats routinely employ scorched-Earth tactics in the realm of judicial politics, Senate Republicans have tended to act with comparative timidity.
In an ominous new ruling from the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals regarding an important ObamaCare decision from earlier this summer, Democrats' Machiavellian methods are again…

Take our 14 Question Quiz to test your knowledge of our National Anthem. (Answer key may be found at the bottom)
1. Which one of the following penned the words to the “The Star-Spangled Banner”?
a. George M. Cohan
b. Benjamin Franklin
c. Francis Scott Key
d. John Philip Souza
2. How many stanzas comprise…

If you want a sign that America’s civic health is not yet in terminal decline, here you go: We still hate Congress.
According to the most recent RealClearPolitics polling average, disapproval of the legislative branch is at over 78 percent. Sure, there are plenty of Beltway chin-scratchers who will tell you that this is a function of Washington…

Judging from public opinion surveys, the American public demonstrates greater sagacity than many political leaders and members of the commentariat when it comes to the subject of police.
Sadly, that includes some otherwise insightful conservatives and libertarians whose behavior in the aftermath of Ferguson, Missouri, riots leave much to be…

There’s a pretty handy rule of thumb in American politics: We forgive our sinners, but not our buffoons.
If you’re Bill Clinton, Mark Sanford, or Ted Kennedy, we will, given enough time, welcome you back into polite society. If, however, you’ve become fodder for late night comics — if you’re Dan Quayle or Joe Biden &mdash…

By all accounts, November’s midterm elections look likely to deal a decisive rebuke to the Obama Administration, currently at a nadir in public opinion.
Should Republicans retake the Senate — an outcome that looks exceedingly plausible — they’ll control both houses of Congress, as well as holding a slim (though unreliable)…

“This is the most transparent administration in history.” – President Barack Obama, February 13, 2013
Apparently, transparency doesn’t mean disclosure, even when it’s legally required.
On August 5, two-thirds of the Inspectors General who serve in the Obama administration sent a letter to Congress saying that several…

DATE OF LAST UPDATE: December 4, 2014
Welcome to the Center for Individual Freedom's State Sovereignty Project, a comprehensive effort devoted to persuading all 50 states to aggressively exercise their authority to serve as a check on the ever-growing and often extra-constitutional power of the federal government.
CFIF’s State…

A political operative friend of mine recently posed a question that’s arresting in its implications: Which do you fear more — the first four years of a Hillary Clinton presidency or the last two years of Barack Obama’s tenure in the Oval Office?
Just a few years ago, the idea that any other Democrat could compare to Mrs. Clinton…

With the IRS scandal and immigration crisis revealing new depths of duplicity in the highest levels of the Obama administration, a pattern of deception is emerging that is lethal to the credibility of government leaders.
Earlier this week, investigators working for the House of Representatives publicized interviews with IRS IT experts that directly…

Being a conservative — or, for that matter, any American with the decency to recoil at Barack Obama’s generalissimo style of governance — is a pretty disheartening experience.
Sure, there’s a schadenfreude to seeing the White House reel from the tidal wave of problems currently submerging it — the international tensions…

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act to "prohibit discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers."
In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which broadly outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as race, religion, national origin or color.
In…

When it comes to the subject of whether to impeach President Barack Obama, Republican sentiment is coalescing around three options: Yes, No and Maybe.
Sarah Palin is now the face of the Yes camp with a blistering op-ed that doesn’t mince words. “Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president,” she writes at Breitbart.…

Here’s a disquieting observation: The most controversial decision out of the Supreme Court this session dealt with a legal requirement that was never approved by a single member of Congress. ObamaCare’s contraception mandate — the applicability of which was narrowed by the judiciary last week — was, believe it or not, never…

Take CFIF's 13 Question Independence Day Quiz to test your knowledge of American history and civics.
(Answer key may be found at the bottom)
1. Americans celebrate the Fourth of July for which one of the following reasons?
a. It marks mid-summer vacation
b. It is the day America declared her independence
c. It marks the day the Revolutionary…

One of the most peculiar facts about American exceptionalism is that we know it exists precisely because so many Americans are blind to its effects. Consider, for instance, all of the factors — each of them luxuries by historical standards — that Americans take for granted: power will peacefully be transferred from one political party to…

The Democratic Party may have finally landed on a campaign slogan for 2014: “Any port in a storm.” That’s the only explanation for the glee that some liberals have been expressing in reaction to the news that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated in the Republican primary for Virginia’s 7th district. They have to have…

The burgeoning Department of Veterans Affairs scandal presages the dysfunctional future of ObamaCare, and it serves to erode what remains of Americans’ faith in the big-government model more generally.
For that reason, liberals find themselves desperate to rationalize by trotting out their usual litany of scapegoats: insufficient…

I have to admit, I’ve always had a hard time with arguments that President Obama is intentionally trying to undermine the standing of the United States of America. It’s a testament to how spectacularly he’s failing the country, however, that I now have to take them seriously, even if they still reside on the outer fringes of plausibility…

In a just world, the scandal over the mistreatment of retired military members by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ healthcare system would’ve broken in early November. That may sound like a strange argument, so bear with me.
The fact that the VA scandal was capturing headlines in late May had the unfortunate effect of making the story…

After years of throwing palm fronds before President Obama’s feet, the sycophants in the media had to admit it: Yep, the scandal within the Department of Veterans Affairs is pretty bad.
It’s hard to imagine how anyone could come to any different conclusion. At the Phoenix VA — the location of the first revelations of systemic dysfunction…

There are certain issues on which America — goaded by a perpetually breathless media — can become too hysterical to react reasonably in the moment. The best example in recent years: gun violence.
Whether it was the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut; the attack on a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, or the Arizona rampage…

The American people don’t really care about Benghazi, right?
In the juvenile words of former Obama Administration National Security Council Spokesman Tommy Vietor to Fox News’s Bret Baier this week, “Dude, this was, like, two years ago.” Or as Hillary Clinton infamously shrieked, “At this point, what difference…

It seems you can’t go anywhere these days without hearing the refrain: America is suffering … and it’s because of the wealthy. Barack Obama rails against fat-cat bankers and employers sitting on money. Liberal protestors bewail the influence of money in politics in the wake of the Supreme Court’s campaign finance rulings.…

Barack Obama loves the rhetorical trope of the “false choice.” From his earliest days as a national figure, the president has repeatedly attempted to convey his intellectual superiority to ordinary politicians by announcing that some controversy of the day is being unnecessarily simplified.
Thus was there “a false choice between…

I probably don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that Tuesday was “Equal Pay Day.” I assume that you gathered with your friends and family to commemorate the fundamental injustice of America, a nation where, as I’m sure you heard ad nauseam this week, women only make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Perhaps you even…

Last week, this column looked at the GOP’s prospects in the Senate races being held around the country this November. As we saw, the GOP is in a strong position to make serious inroads in the upper chamber. This week, we’ll pick up where we left off, with a consideration of the rest of the races not analyzed in last week’s piece.…

The irony of Paul Ryan’s career is that he should be every liberal’s favorite conservative.
On Medicare and Medicaid he accepts the premise that government has a role to play in providing access to medical care for the elderly and poor. Back in 2009, his ObamaCare alternative – the Patient’s Choice Act – used a similar…

President Obama and Democrats in Washington are in trouble. With the economy still listless, America looking helpless abroad and ObamaCare increasingly looking like the biggest failed experiment in social engineering since Prohibition, it’s no surprise that the Left regards this fall’s midterm elections with dread.
Of the 33 Senate seats…

"Hillary Clinton's lack of transparency is newsworthy as investigators attempt to ascertain her work around the time of the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi. Certainly the media could stay quite busy investigating how Clinton communicated with her colleagues and the White House, how secure her email communications were, whether they were hacked, who was privy to this law-breaking (…[more]

—Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, The Federalist Senior Editor

— Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, The Federalist Senior Editor

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